


think twice before you start believing

by spaceluke



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Gideon is Not A Fan of the Snarts, Hero Leonard Snart, Leonard & Lisa Snart Sibling Feels, Leonard Snart needs more softness in his life, Lewis Snart's A+ Parenting, Mental Health Issues, Self-Harm, Set Immediately After S1E2, i'm no expert but the snarts have cptsd, spaceships aren't comfortable, these tags sound sad but this fic is Soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-16 11:38:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17548982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceluke/pseuds/spaceluke
Summary: After Leonard Snart steals the Maximillian Emerald and turns it over to his father, he returns to theWaveriderand finds that—although nothing about the world around him has changed—he has both a new run-in with his father and a new set of childhood memories to cope with. Or, given his propensity as such, tonotcope with.





	think twice before you start believing

**Author's Note:**

> Hey hello! This is the first media I'm posting in this fandom! Wild! I've been silently consuming it since Arrow was in S2! ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Title is from _Overachiever_ by Vera Blue, which is in fact about a toxic romantic relationship but is also about Len's complicated feelings about Lewis, fight me. Also relevant is _Beggin' for Thread_ by BANKS, which is, just in general, a PTSD bop.
> 
> Quick thank you to my delightful [sister](http://yrbeecharmer.tumblr.com) for making sure this was postable and helping me with a title. Sorry for dragging you into every fandom I end up in, but also I'm not, because now we're in this together.
> 
> Content warning for non-graphic self-harm, mentions of passive suicidality, and discussion of self-hatred/self-loathing (more detail in endnotes).

            Len sits in silence with his knees pulled up on his bunk for a long time after the funeral. Mick needs his own space to process, just because he knows Len’s story so well, and no one else knows shit about him or what he just did—Jax barely even bothered asking—so Len just stays there and lets his joints ache and his muscles tighten up from sitting in one place for such a long time. Spaceships are cold, it turns out, and made of lots of hard surfaces, and pretty uncomfortable. The captain—Rip— _Hunter_ has given them all ten hours of personal time before they have to galavant off into the eighties, and everyone else is ostensibly using it to sleep and bathe and have meals and do other things that Lisa would call basic self-care, but Len can’t quite bring himself to do any of them. He certainly can’t sleep, anyway, not after being face to face with his father like that. He knows he would just wake up from a nightmare two hours in. His shrink would call that normal, for him.

            He feels like he’s dissociating, for a while, before he realizes that his memory is just sliding a few feet to the left, integrating things that hadn’t existed before with everything that was already there. Things that he created, maybe six hours earlier. He rubs at his temple. It feels like a migraine, mostly, remembering new memories, shakily recognizing himself in the mirror the first time he shaved his head, figuring out that the man who’d knelt on the hallway floor in the middle of the night telling him not to let his heart get broken wasn’t a dream, that the space-gun was Ramon’s cold gun. He’d figured it out as soon as he bought the gun off the STAR Labs janitor, back in ‘14, but it hadn’t made a lick of sense then. It only made sense once he saw the _Waverider_ and had realized that Hunter’s insane proposal was for real. _Fuck_. 

            But all of that exists in concurrence with his real—original—other memory of his childhood, the one where he’d gone downstairs to get a glass of water and bumped into his father on his way back to bed, asked, “what were you doing in the basement, Daddy?”

            Lewis had told him, “nothing to trouble your head over, kid, go back on up to sleep,” even though the shape of the gun in the waistband of his pants had been obvious even to a child. Len feels like maybe he’s made a huge mistake.

            His memories of being taken on jobs with his father haven’t changed, though, and it’s not like the scar from the Santini bullet that had grazed his side or the cigarette burns on his forearm or even the tiny tattoos—a skate blade, a lick of flame, an open circuit—hidden on his ribcage have rewritten themselves, and he still remembers the first time he saw Lisa after getting out of juvie, her curls bouncy and her smile bright, their father looking at her with a light in his eyes Len had never seen directed at him. Some things wouldn’t change, he supposes. He wonders if Lisa’s broken-bottle scar on her shoulder is still there, and he prays that maybe, just maybe, some things have changed. That maybe he got there in time. He texts her, knowing that it’s 1986 and texting won’t be around for another decade-ish and phones won’t be able to support it easily for two, but he’s in a _time machine_ , so who the fuck knows. 

             _hey anklebiter, did i ever tell you a bedtime story about a man with a gun from outer space who talked me into being a selfish asshole_ , he types, even though it wasn’t what he told himself at all, and almost sends it, and then Gideon interrupts him. 

            “Captain Hunter has instructed you not to contact anyone off the ship,” she says, and Len rolls his eyes. 

            “Do you have any way of stopping me, Poindexter?” he asks the ceiling, and she’s an _AI_ , he shouldn’t be able to feel her disdain as though she’s a person in the room with him. He can anyway. She doesn’t answer, so he hits send, and the little typing bubble pops up immediately.

             _yeah that one was a little bit fucked up,_ Lisa replies, then, _why?_ and Len smiles down at his phone.

             _what would the cold gun have looked like to a six-year-old in 1975,_ he says, and he can still feel Gideon lurking disapprovingly, but she doesn’t even bother telling him no. Lisa sends back a string of exclamation marks and then he gets a facetime request.

            “Lenny, you _didn’t_ ,” is the first thing she says and Len just shrugs. “when you told me you were going time traveling, I thought you meant so that the Flash would stop trying to convince you to become a crusader for truth, justice, and the American way, not so that you could make paradoxes, you dweeb.”

            Gideon’s disapproval deepens. “Captain Hunter did not give you permission to inform anyone of your missives,” she says, and Lisa startles.

            “ _Chill_ , Gideon. Lise, there’s no one else here, just us and the ‘artificial interactive consciousness,’” Len says, doing his best to imitate her voice, and Gideon finally gets so pissed at him that her floating hologram head pops up on the table in the corner of his room, looking murderous. Len flips the camera. “Say hello. Gideon, my sister Lisa. Lisa, Gideon. We’re getting along famously, I’m sure you will too.”

            “Mr. Snart,” Gideon starts, and Len holds up a hand.

            “She’s _trustworthy_ , Gidge, don’t worry about it,” he says, and the Gideon-face looks so affronted at being called _Gidge_ that Len has to stop and take a deep breath. If he let himself laugh at her he’s pretty sure it would turn into crying and he can’t handle that. Right now or ever, really. “Besides, it’s nineteen eighty-six, it’s not like I’ve got a lot of wifi hotspots to choose from, so I figure you must be the one patching us through. You can’t be all that mad.”

            “Holy shit, you’re in nineteen eighty-six?” Lisa asks, at the same time as Gideon says, “program protocols about your communications override my belief that this may negatively affect the timeline.”

            Len tilts his head and watches Lisa do the same. “Program protocols, huh,” he says, but shakes himself out of it. He reached out to Lisa for a reason, damn it. He can interrogate Gideon later. “Interesting. Will those protocols let you leave me alone for a while?”

            “If you insist, Mr. Snart,” Gideon says, and there’s a lot less reluctance in her voice, and then Len can feel her just kind of… disappear. _Weird_. 

            “How did you get this gig again?” Lisa asks, eyes narrow, and Len doesn’t even know where to _start_. He sighs, and thinks again about how maybe he fucked up by trying to un-fuck things up. He leans back against the wall, tips his head back until it _thunks_. Does it again. It’s so cold, colder than the air or the mattress under him. The pain is too dull to ground him but it’s still there, an ache spreading through the back of his head. “Lenny?”

            “Even though I lead a life of crime, I’ve still been a good brother, right?” Len asks, and then glances down at Lisa’s face on the screen and regrets asking. She looks _gutted_. She looks a lot like how he feels, actually. He wants to hang up and pretend this conversation ever happened, but he just forces his eyes away from the screen instead and grits his teeth. “Forget I asked,” he says.

            “ _You_ stole the emerald, not Dad. You did it, and gave it to him, didn’t you,” she says, and it _hurts_ , that she figured him out so easily. She sounds horrified and proud all at once. “Why?”

            Len can’t look at her. Can’t speak. He has to swallow so that his stomach isn’t in his throat anymore and his heart returns to its place among his ribs. His hand that isn’t holding the phone is shaking and he clenches it into a fist. 

            “I didn’t before. It was him in my version—the first version, anyway, that was how he got caught, and I thought… well, I thought I could change things,” he says, bitter and frustrated, but there’s a tremor in his voice, the kind that he’d trained out of himself when he was seventeen and had had to learn how to shoot a gun without being afraid of it. He closes in on himself, locks the tremor away, and when he resurfaces, his hand has stopped shaking. “I was wrong.”

            “Lenny,” Lisa says. Her voice is hard, and Len is glad she’s not pitying him. He didn’t expect her to, expected nothing less than her being furious like this, but still. “Time travel can’t change someone’s _personality_. Dad was a shitty person. Don’t be an idiot about this. I don’t know what you remember from the first time around, _Jesus_ , this is so fucked up, but you can’t blame yourself for _him_.”

            Len shrugs. “Too late,” he says, and Lisa hangs up on him. _That’s fair_ , he thinks. 

            He almost doesn’t pick up when she calls him back immediately, but he can’t really stop himself, either. “Sorry,” she says, and he knows she’s lying. “Do something for me? Go get Mick. He’s on that tin can somewhere, right?”

            “I don’t want to talk to him about this,” Len says, and Lisa shrugs, her hair bouncing.

            “That’s really too bad,” she says. “You know it’s like four in the morning? I guess time isn’t real for you or whatever, but I could be sleeping. So you can stop feeling sorry for yourself and find Mick.”

            Len groans and feels several joints pop as he hauls himself upright after sitting still for hours, most of them not in a good way. “ _Ow,_ ” he says, and unsurprisingly, Lisa does not make any indication that she cares. He finds Mick in the galley with Stein and Sara, and Len doesn’t want to deal with introductions so he just shoves his phone in his pocket and lets it muffle Lisa’s indignant huff. 

            “Sorry to interrupt, but, Mick,” he says, letting his disaffected drawl fall into place in front of the other crew members, “a word?”

            Stein arches an eyebrow like he disapproves—like he gets a _say_ —but Mick rises and nods and follows Len into the hall. “Of course,” he says. “You alright?” 

            Len shrugs, nonchalant—Gideon’s presence has been evident since he left his room and it’s choking him—and leads Mick back towards his bunk. “Sure,” he says as the doors open, then turns to face Mick once they’re shut again and fishes his phone out of his pocket. “Faced down my worst nightmare and had to live to tell the tale.”

            “ _Len_ ,” Lisa hisses, and Mick’s face gets stuck between lit up at seeing her and horrified at Len. That’s pretty reasonable, Len thinks. 

            “Lisey, doll, it’s good to see your face,” Mick rumbles, plucking the phone out of Len’s hand, and Len is pretty sure he would be hugging her and hiding his face in her hair if she were here. He’s such a sensory person, and complains that Len keeps his hair too short, but besides that, he loves everything about Lisa in all the same ways Len does. Len thinks it’s why they’ve managed to stay together for as long as they have, even with their assorted bumps in the road. Anyway. In typical Mick fashion, he takes her side. “Thanks for making him come get me, I didn’t realize he was like this.”

            “I’m fine,” Len says, hoisting himself back up onto his bed, his whole body protesting. “You know, we might be too old for this eleventh-hour shit, Mick.”

            Both Lisa and Mick sigh, and Mick pulls himself up onto the bed behind Len so that Len can sit in the vee of his legs and lean back on him and his constant warmth. Mick hands him his phone back and wraps his left arm around Len’s shoulders, letting his hand rest over the front of his right shoulder, where he has constant tension from carrying the weight of the cold gun. His other hand finds the aching bruise on the outside of his right thigh from its poorly insulated casing and badly-secured holster. Len hisses. 

            “Yeah, I bet those hurt,” Mick says, pressing hard on the shoulder and soothing over the bruise. “What else is wrong?”

            “He thinks he shouldn’t be allowed to be a human being,” Lisa says, and not for the first time, Len finds himself regretting encouraging her to take honors psychology her senior year of high school. Worse, she’d been at the top of the class. He’d wanted her to use it to go to college; she only ever wants to use it on _him_. If he wanted to hear this, he would have called his therapist. “It’s pointless. Make him stop.”

            “I didn’t manage to change anything,” Len insists, and Lisa makes a little _harrumph_ ing noise and Mick tips his head forward so their cheeks are pressed together. “And now I have two sets of memories from when I was six and one of them involves me, now, telling my six-year-old self not to come out to dad in such a roundabout way that I went and did it anyway. In both timelines and everything!”

            Mick squeezes him with the arm wrapped around his shoulders. It’s grounding, more than the pain or the cold had been, and Len sighs. 

            “I just wanted to maybe end up a less shitty person,” he says quietly, and Mick squeezes tighter. He can’t look at the screen, doesn’t want to see Lisa's face. Mick grumbles and shifts so that both arms are wrapped around Len, so that he’s holding him kind of like a child. It’s so comfortable that Len can’t even complain. He’s warm for the first time in _days_. 

            “Boy, the Flash really has done a number on you, hasn’t he,” Lisa says, her tone sardonic, and Len shrugs. It’s not like Barry’s ever said anything to Len he hadn’t already wondered about himself, just—Barry puts so much unwavering belief into his words that Len started to take stock in them too, little by little. Joining the crew of the _Waverider_ had just been one big action making up for all the ones he’d sidestepped for the sake of appearances. He’d just been catching to his headspace, really. 

            “Nah, Lenny’s just a dumbass,” Mick says, and Len tries to sit up, slither out of Mick’s grasp, offended, but Mick won’t let him. “Aw, shut up, it’s true. I didn’t—hell, I _don’t—_ wanna be here, but now that I’ve seen you work a job with this crew, I get it. It’s who you were always meant to be, all that bullshit.”

            “What, a hero?” Lisa asks before Len can say anything, and Len scoffs. “No, ‘cause, like, I see it. I’ve totally been a damsel in distress and you’ve been my white knight, parts of my entire life. Yeah, we’re criminals, but you’re a good _person_ , Lenny.”

            “It’s no surprise you turned out the way you did, ‘nother casualty of the goddamn class war on Keystone and all that, and s’not like you’re alone in that. Hell, you’re lucky you’ve lived this long,” Mick says, one of his moments of being able to clearly articulate his insight, and Len sighs. “Just, Len, you’re too fuckin’ hard on yourself. Lisey and I are still here, alright, and we love you even though you’re a shithead who’s mean to her boyfriends and burned down my kitchen.”

            “That was an accident,” Len says, but doesn’t push it, just leans back against Mick and finally looks at the screen. Lisa’s smiling up at him, softer than he’s seen in a long time, and she pushes her hair behind her ears and sticks her tongue out at him. He rolls his eyes but smiles back. 

            “I know you’re not going to stop with the self-loathing right away just because we told you to,” Lisa says. Len wishes she were here so he could tug her curls, so she could punch him on the shoulder and curl up in his lap like when they were little kids. It would ease the ache, he thinks. He didn’t know he would miss her so much; he didn’t see her all that often when he was living in Keystone full time anyway, she was busy running her own jobs in the Coast City and Bludhaven and sometimes even Gotham, but knowing he’s in the temporal zone and won’t see her until he doesn’t know when is just—awful. It’s like a stone in his stomach. 

            “Probably not,” he agrees, a degree more lighthearted. “I’m probably gonna hate myself forever.” 

            Mick grumbles behind him the same way he always does when Len makes jokes about suicide or self-hatred, but Lisa just sighs. 

           “It’s like Mick said,” she tells him. “You’re a dumbass. But that’s not news, Lenny, and we love you, idiocy and all.”

            Len thinks about the one time Lewis had told him he loved him—Len had been eleven and successfully picked his first lock, and Lewis had been drinking and finally, finally impressed by him. He had held onto that moment, that memory, until its edges were worn smooth and shiny like a polished rock, and it had lost all its meaning.

            He curls himself further into Mick’s embrace and tries to forget about any family but the one there with him now, keeping him warm.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning in more detail: re self-harm: Len hits his head against the wall in order to ground with pain. re passive suicidality: Len says he "had to live to tell the tale" after seeing his father, implying he wishes he wasn't alive. There's also a mention of Mick's displeasure at hearing Len make jokes about suicide. re self-hatred/self-loathing: that's it, that's the whole fic. (Actually, though, I'm not gonna list out examples because there's too many. Len's self-esteem is crippling. We can leave it there.)
> 
> I hope y'all uh... enjoyed? I know it wasn't exactly lighthearted, but I hope you at least got something out of it, lmao. I had fun writing it, or at least it felt like I was filling in a whole hell of a gap the writers left. (You can't just see your lifelong abuser face-to-face and then go on with your life like nothing happened, in my experience. But ok, LoT. Ok.)
> 
> And like, I _get it_ that maybe Wentworth Miller wanted to not be doing the CW thing anymore, or has other projects he wants to work on, or etc. I can respect whatever his reasoning was for leaving the role of Captain Cold, because he's, you know, a person with his own life to live, but as a fan, I wasn't done with his character, dammit. I still have a lot of feelings to contend with. So here I am almost a year after his last appearance in the Arrowverse still writing fic about Leonard Snart and his fucked up mental health. Because sometimes it's like that.
> 
> Anyway, my sister would probably like if I had other people to yell with about Leonard Snart and the Arrowverse. I welcome any and all interaction on my [tumblr](http://messsy-boy.tumblr.com)! Come say hi!


End file.
